TIPPING POINT:Recent events at Semple Stadium, Skopje and Roland Garros revealed once again sport's ability to lift our collective spirits, writes BRIAN O'CONNOR

I WAS going to go the contrarian route this morning. About patriotism, and the flag, and not turning up to have the green wrapped about you. And other stuff, like the importance of sport, and how it can lift the national mood, and how that’s mostly guff from rent-a-quote merchants with something to flog or egos to knead or profiles to puff.

There’s real mileage going down that road. Careers have been moulded out of sticking a digit out, sensing the popular mood and then resolutely scribbling against the tide. In fact it’s important such attitudes float about in the khazi of popular discourse, like chirping canaries in a cage of overwhelmingly “paaaaasitive” gasses. But it’s a bit too pat, at least when it comes to the sports thing.

Patriotism now, that’s a different ball game. There’s been a lot of it flung around in relation to The Boys In Greeaan, The Worst You’ve Ever Seeeaan, apparently. Plenty people have got plenty exercised about the willingness or otherwise of certain players to show up and play for their country.

Greed, they’ve been accused of, and arrogance, and disdain for the public. Just about the only insult that hasn’t been thrown their way is corruption. But we reserve that little doozy, along with the others, for our real patriots, a political elite we elect and a business establishment we don’t, both of which have conspired to wrap a financial green flag around our broke, benighted, basket-case-of-a-nation necks.

There wasn’t a lot wrong with the Irish team’s pride in Macedonia on Saturday night. There was plenty of luck going around too but no one can’t say they weren’t due some. And mixed in with the luck was a commendable honesty of effort and expression – which is always something to be admired when it is surrounded by so much that isn’t.

The detritus of that ultra-Irish grá for the nod and the wink is all around us now, from the big corporate stuff to the little things: like GAA players not getting fixed up with jobs anymore. Time was when the ability to play hurling or football was an automatic route into Sales Representation, even if said hurler or footballer had all the people skills of Charles Manson. But not anymore.

Now there’s concern that the local, parish heroes can’t get “sorted out” and the poorly treated dears might have to leave the country along with the 50,000 other souls every year. This is said with the sort of po-faced piety that seemingly fails to make the connection between that particular “jobs for the boys” policy and any other one in society.

But that’s to be contrary, and while it is easy to go down that route, and maybe even correct, there has been too much going on in sport these last few days for such scepticism to win out completely. You see, there’s a reason why it is the Irish football team that gets everyone so riled while much more worthy targets for our derision get away comparatively lightly. It’s because it matters to people. Not in any important “how long should a person have to wait in AE in a supposedly developed country?” way. But just because something is trivial doesn’t make it irrelevant.

In a country where damn near every vital stanchion of our society is at best wobbly, with a built-in expectation that they are out to hinder, not help, we expect better from sport

I have a theory – quelle surprise – about why that is. Basically it revolves around fairness. Sport provides that, at least the principles do.

It’s hard to get too romantic about Sepp Blatter and the cronyism in which our own FAI indulged to keep a venerable Swiss megalomaniac playing politics.

However, the real stuff is so pathetically underwhelming that our expectations of it are nil. In our marrow we know we’re being lied to, whether it’s some platitudinous politico, besuited business type, or a buck-passing administrator. At its core sport is different because it offers a straightforward reward for talent and effort. It’s an artificial arena that offers a firmly rooted, sweaty antidote to that self-serving claptrap about “shoulders to the wheel” and “spirit of the nation” bullshit which is floating around now.

Look at Shay Given in Skopje, and recognise the continued understated excellence he continues to display. Or Robbie Keane still vehemently demanding the pressure and hassle of playing for Ireland. Or Gooch Cooper still making physically bigger men look like uncertain kids in the face of pure ability.

Best of all look back at Friday evening’s French Open tennis semi-final at Roland Garros where Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer, the best player in the world right now and the best player in history (as they were described with incredible generosity by Rafa Nadal) put in three and three-quarter hours of such sublime talent, guts and wit, where the only strokes were tinged with genius, that even a notoriously sceptical Parisian crowd rose to acclaim them with unabashed awe.

That’s why it riles so much when the latest streak of cycling gristle tears up an Alp at a rate of knots that suggests something other than mother’s home-cooking is inside him.

Or some snooker player on the make deliberately shaves a ball because it’s worth a few grand to him from his punting mates. Such conniving is everywhere in our lives, just usually played out on a scale and at a level we know is impervious to our input. We don’t need it when we dream too.

Bismarck famously used to run the flag up whenever the mob got too unruly. He even invaded poor, harmless Denmark just to take the mob’s minds off something piffling, like bread. Appealing to people’s patriotism is always a last resort – a sure sign there’s damn all else left.

So to hell with the flag-waving, but let’s hang on to the dreams. Whether it’s between the lines on a patch of red clay in Paris, a glorified building site in Skopje, or a Semple Stadium reeking of burgers and Lynx, they remain contrarily powerful enough to be very important indeed.